Rhys set off, leaving Soma’s mansion behind. A gaggle of men and women in matching robes wandered off at about the same time, so he mingled with them until their paths separated. He turned his feet back from whence he’d come, at least until the other mages were out of sight and out of range of his mana senses. Only then did he toss down a quick trash can and hop into the void, stepping out onto his island refuge.

  “Daran. Hey. You left out some vital information, huh? Didn’t mention that Soma was crazy hot and also horned up like whoa? Did that not seem like important information to you?”

  “The Soma I knew was not like that,” Daran said, crossing his arms as he materialized.

  “No? You sure? He doesn’t seem like someone who’s only just decided to live a life of waste and excess.”

  Daran wrinkled his nose. “He was created as a lump of impurities. Hideous was an understatement. He was barely human-shaped, and no one would have mistaken him for an actual human being. He lacked the ability to maintain his form. When he managed to create skin, it melted away under the strength of his impurities. Even something like regular-shaped limbs was beyond him. When he slept or rested, his body melted into a lump of filth. I worried that he might not survive without my support at first, because he needed to rest in a specially-crafted glass jar that was resistant to his impurities, or else he’d slowly melt into the earth.”

  “Worried he’d fall out of the world?” Rhys joked.

  “More worried that he would dilute himself out of existence.”

  Rhys twisted his nose. Compared to Sid or Straw, Soma had really had a rough go of it right from the start. It wasn’t that he saw his current self in Soma, despite the similarities they shared, but that he couldn’t help but sympathize with someone the whole world rejected. In his first life, even if it wasn’t necessarily true, he’d often felt that way—as if the whole world was rejecting him and everything he was. Of course, that was just the depression, lack of vitamin D, and terminal internet doomscrolling speaking, but in Soma’s case, it was quite literal. The world rejected him.

  And yet, he persisted. He had found a niche for himself. He had constructed a place for himself to belong, and owned it. Himself and Soma both. Their places were very different, but they’d both carved out a spot for themselves.

  Daran looked at Rhys. “You like him.”

  Rhys nodded. “Yeah. Not like that, but yeah. I can’t help but sympathize.”

  “He probably knows that and is playing to your emotions,” Daran said dismissively.

  Rhys frowned at him. That wasn’t true at all. Soma had never said anything to trigger him thinking this way. He’d come up with it on his own, and hadn’t even indicated to Soma that he felt this way, because it would sound like pity, and that would insult what Soma had achieved. “That’s not true.”

  Daran harrumphed and turned away, but this time, Rhys followed after him. “Why do you reject your creations so strongly? Straw has ‘latent nurturing instincts,’ and you act like that’s a bad thing. Sid is reasonable enough on his own terms; he isn’t a rampaging beast, he’s just a guy with a short fuse. Soma is his own person, who’s chosen his own fate rather than blindly following what you wanted from him—but there’s nothing wrong with that, even if it means weakening his impurities a little.

  “The point is, they’re all highly successful beings in their own right. There isn’t a single one of them who’s failing at their goals, or even failing to progress as mages. So why are you so blind to who they are, as opposed to who you want them to be?”

  Daran looked at Rhys. “I created weapons, and they aren’t fighting the way I want. Is it a crime to be disappointed?”

  Taken aback, Rhys shook his head. “That’s not what you did, and you know it. You’ve almost called them your children yourself before… you’ve even admitted other people saw them as your children. These aren’t objects you created. They’re your children. Stop seeing them as objects, and see them as the people they are.”

  “Overcome by sentimentality. How typical.”

  Rhys didn’t know what to say. For a few seconds, he just stared at Daran in disbelief. “Is that really how you feel? Do you really not see them as humans?”

  “They aren’t.”

  “Fine. Let’s play the game of semantics. As people.”

  Daran opened his mouth, then shut it. All at once, he pointed at Rhys’s sword. “Do you see that thing as a person, then?”

  “What, The Hunger? I mean, it’s kind of simple, but it’ll get there.”

  “Pure foolishness. It’s merely a reflection of you, the creator’s, desires. It has no mind of its own.”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “Damn, Daran, get yourself a partner.”

  Daran blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  Rhys put his hands up. “I mean, if Soma’s a reflection of your desires, then… whoof. You need a good, strong partner to keep you pleased, you know what I mean?”

  “Obviously they’ve… grown and adapted over time, to—”

  “Become their own people?”

  “—pervert themselves from their original purpose,” Daran finished.

  Rhys sighed. “You’re literally arguing in circles. Are they nothing but a reflection of your desires, or are they capable of ‘perverting themselves,’ to use your words that I, by the way, strongly disagree with, away from their original purpose? Ridiculous. Are you that blind to the truth that you’ll make up endless excuses rather than face reality, even if your excuses contradict themselves?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a child, when I have studied—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, and people used to think dogs and cats were incapable of feeling emotions or having self-awareness, because that’s something ‘only humans can do,’ even though it’s quite self-evident that they have moods, emotions, and self-awareness if you spend any time around one.” He paused. “Well. Around a smart one. The dumb ones… I’m not so sure.”

  He took a moment to meet Daran’s eyes and hold his gaze. “Do you really think they’re just reflections of your desires? Do you really think they aren’t capable of thinking for themselves?”

  “I…”

  Rhys shook his head and walked away. He’d known Daran had some kind of hangup toward the Weapons, but he hadn’t known just what it was. Now that he did… he didn’t even know. He felt like, somehow, he’d gotten further from the truth by hearing Daran’s opinion of his take—as if Daran knew himself worse than someone looking in from the outside.

  He sighed. I didn’t come here to argue with some old man, I came here to level up. He crossed the island, heading toward his old warp points into the Empire. Even after the battle, the Empire was still pretty well seeded with his trash cans, in stark contrast to the Alliance, which meant he had his free choice of reentry point. It wasn’t as if anyone knew what he was trying to do, even if he assumed they knew that he could use trash cans as warp points. Worst case, they knew to guard or look out for trash cans, but not which one he’d use.

  Being the cautious person he was, he approached his chosen warp point from within the void and watched it for a few moments rather than blindly rushing through. When he saw nothing—not a guard, or even a high-tier mage in the general vicinity—he hopped through.

  He came out into a battlefield. The city burned around him, while two opposing groups of mages dueled one another in the sky. One of the mages shouted, and a tiger made of flames rushed at the other group. The lead mage in the other group slashed her scimitar, and the tiger fell out of the sky and crashed to the ground, spreading even more flames among the buildings around Rhys.

  Rhys extended his mana senses, then dashed off. Quickly visiting each house with a living being inside, he yanked them out, then set them all in a neat group at the edge of the nearby forest. Most ran off without looking back, though one or two protested him grabbing them or fought back—some even with mana-empowered moves. They were all so low-tier that their attacks were basically irrelevant to him, so he ignored them, dumped them with the rest, and ran back in.

  When there were no more people trapped in the burning buildings, he took off, making a beeline for the mines. He didn’t really care, but if he was right in front of a disaster with the ability to save lives, he might as well. It was hypocritical in the extreme, because he’d just as often—if not more often—been the source of disaster, and he knew there was at least one young mortal boy who would find his actions absolutely laughable, but he didn’t really care. Life was a big fat pile of hypocrisies and contradictions. Even criticizing Daran was surely contradictory to something he’d said before in the past, but he didn’t care. Someone had to criticize the man, and he just happened to be the one with the opportunity to do it.

  He wasn’t going to let his past influence his future. Just because he was in his villain-slash-regime-toppling arc right now, didn’t mean he couldn’t have a superhero arc in the future. It was better to set the foundations for all possible arcs, so it didn’t seem ridiculous when he decided to pursue a different aesthetic.

  And maybe he didn’t need things to ‘make sense’ for him to want to save lives. Was it that crazy of a thing to do, that he had to explain himself and justify his life saving behavior?

  Hmm. Maybe the fact that I feel like I need to justify me saving lives is a sign that I’m on the wrong path, Rhys considered, as he ran full-tilt toward a mine full of impurities, which almost anyone would consider as ‘on the wrong path.’

  He ran on while the battle continued overhead. One or two of the mages shot him nervous looks, but seeing that he was an eccentric who was uninterested in stopping the fight even if he had saved the mortals and weaklings, they proceeded to ignore him and continue with their fight and leave well enough alone.

  Before long, Rhys found himself in familiar territory. The mine loomed, and he slowed to a halt. Even from here, he could feel the weight of the impurities pounding down on him. They weren’t as extreme as the pitch-black darkness Daran had shown him, but they were close. He pinched his chin. I might not need the trashifying beam to take these on. If I do, I do; but if I don’t, they should be excellent tolerance training for absorbing yet more dangerous impurities!

  The mine was abandoned, just as it had been under the Empire. Although he had no doubt that many of the Empire’s facilities had been raided with the fall of the Empire, this one was basically a nuclear dumping ground. The only people who looted that would end up very shortly dead—whether he was talking nuclear material or this mine of intense impurities. Rhys strolled in, and almost immediately found several bodies strewn in the entrance. He stopped.

  Okay, well, some people are incurably stupid, I guess. It hadn’t been massively raided, but maybe an unknown mine was too much of a lure for some strange mages with either a death wish, or a little too much confidence. Idiots who would raid the equivalent of a nuclear waste dumping ground were undoubtably trash. He slurped them up into his core with a shake of his head and proceeded deeper into the mine, sucking the ambient impurities into himself as he went.

  At his hip, The Hunger woke up with a trembling shake and did the sword equivalent of looking around, then started to hum—almost purr—as it slurped up impurities alongside Rhys. The two of them proceeded deeper into the mines, vanishing into the darkness.